After Kyrsten Sinema rescued the grotesquely regressive carried interest loophole, the Senate slipped in a $73 billion tax on stock buybacks. It's long overdue.
I kind of don't understand what the big deal is over stock buybacks relative to dividends. They're both ways of distributing cash to shareholders. You can automatically re-invest dividends, and you can choose to sell into the market when a buyback is happening. And both dividends and capital gains (at least on shares held over a year) get an unjust tax preference relative to workers' income.
As for buybacks funded with debt -- as I recall, the LBO artists of the '80s fairly frequently funded "special dividends" out of debt.
I kind of don't understand what the big deal is over stock buybacks relative to dividends. They're both ways of distributing cash to shareholders. You can automatically re-invest dividends, and you can choose to sell into the market when a buyback is happening. And both dividends and capital gains (at least on shares held over a year) get an unjust tax preference relative to workers' income.
As for buybacks funded with debt -- as I recall, the LBO artists of the '80s fairly frequently funded "special dividends" out of debt.